Press Release

Locks Gallery is pleased to present Edna Andrade: Drawings (1958-1993), September 1 through October 9, 2010. There will be a reception on Friday, September 10th, from 5:30 to 7:30pm. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog.

Philadelphia artist Edna Andrade (1917-2008) was revered for her mastery of Op Art technique and hard-edge geometric abstraction. Despite a long career that included many gallery and museum exhibitions, the great breadth of her drawings is only now emerging as the individual works on paper are catalogued. Andrade’s total extant body of drawings spans over 70 years and ranges widely in subject and medium.

Locks Gallery will present a selection of approximately 40 works on paper using a diverse range of media including acrylic, charcoal, graphite, ink, pastel and watercolor. Many of the drawings will be shown for the first time and reveal surprising insights into the different periods of the artist’s career.

Andrade’s early drawings, from the beginning of the 1950s, of landscapes or landscape-inspired abstractions developed into optical artwork—at a time when the artist was unaware of the emerging movement. The drawings from the ‘60s and ‘70s reveal the artist’s process for developing her well-known geometric paintings—many now in museum collections across the country.

Andrade was a professor at the Philadelphia College of Art (now The University of the Arts) for over 20 years. The artist often remarked that her painting shifted when she began teaching color theory and in particular Josef Albers’s methods. But her passion for drawing began much earlier - inspired by a Pennsylvania Academy trained teacher in her rural Virginia school. Andrade completed the Academy’s rigorous drawing requirements as a student there in the late ‘30s. The artist would focus primarily on drawing later in her career, when she completed a large body of work - stark, graphite depictions of the Maine coast - created in the 1990s.

Edna Andrade (1917-2008) lived and worked in Philadelphia from the time she came to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as a student, until her death. Renowned for her challenging optical and hard-edged abstract paintings, the artist had a significant influence on the Philadelphia art scene for over forty years. The artist’s work is in numerous museums throughout the U.S. including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Dallas Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Baltimore Art Museum.